Like many, at Camunda we’re looking forward to getting 2020 behind us. Yet with all its challenges and unexpected twists and turns, we were fortunate to also experience many bright spots throughout the year.
The pandemic forced us, along with our user community, customers and partners to revisit well-laid plans and work around inevitable disruptions.
Yet, as organizations large and small navigated the challenges associated with remote work and newly distributed teams, the need for the “digital enterprise” and fully automated processes became more apparent than ever. Our process automation platform proved to be fast to implement and scale in a time of need and helped many organizations around the world to adapt to new circumstances.
As a result, we are able to welcome tens of thousands of new users and scores of new enterprise customers in 2020, including Atlassian, Airbus, Desjardins Group, Priceline and Telstra. It’s Camunda’s biggest year to date, and we will finish 2020 having achieved our initial ambitious goals. It’s a great result from tremendously challenging circumstances.
Automating Any Process, Anywhere
Our focus this past year has been to extend and expand our platform to make it possible for users to orchestrate and automate processes across more technologies, infrastructures and users. Take a look at some of the features that our dev team pushed out in the first half of the year:
– Simplified adoption across developer communities: Expands REST API with OpenAPI support.
– New lightweight distribution for running Camunda as a standalone orchestration engine: the newly added Camunda BPM Run distribution can be deployed faster in containerized environments such as Docker and Kubernetes with no Java or application server knowledge needed.
– Updated standards-based decisioning: This release greatly improves DMN support with the addition of the DMN 1.3 Namespace as well as full coverage of the FEEL Expression Language in version 1.2.
– Process events monitoring across systems: End-to-end process monitoring based on events, available in Camunda’s Optimize 3.0, adds a unified view of real-time process insights from any data source.
– Improved design collaboration in large projects: Visually track changes across different versions of process models with Cawemo.
Then, with our 7.14 release in October, we brought new functionality to help modernize fragmented and fragile RPA bot implementations that cost companies billions of dollars annually to implement and maintain. Now users can orchestrate, monitor, and analyze multiple RPA bots, and make them part of a fully managed, end-to-end business process.
- RPA orchestration with BPMN and DMN standards: Configure and automate processes end-to-end using the popular BPMN and DMN standards for process and decision automation to orchestrate RPA bots.
- Out-of-the-box bridge for popular RPA tools: Increase developer productivity with pre-built connections to popular RPA tools. This latest release includes an integration with UiPath
- Catalog of RPA services: Create and reuse templates that connect tasks to existing RPA services.
- End-to-end process design: Create, edit, and specify end-to-end processes that include RPA task activities alongside BPMN task types.
- Operational visibility into RPA bot activities: Provide alerts and centrally monitor and analyze RPA bot activities.
- RPA analytics and insights: Optimize end-to-end process automation through analytics and reporting across legacy systems, RPA vendors and other process components.
Camunda Community Live – Worldwide
The pandemic certainly interrupted what was expected to be a very busy year of traveling to meet with customers and the community across the globe. Our event calendar went virtual, and we learned to adapt to online platforms.
Yet there was a silver lining — we had the opportunity to bring our conferences and meetups online and worldwide to a larger audience than we ever imagined, and we’ve been able to help our community forge deeper connections with fellow Camunda users all across the world.
Instead of two onsite conferences in New York and Berlin, CamundaCon LIVE brought together 11,000 participants from all corners of the world across two online events.
October’s CamundaCon LIVE 2020.2 was preceded by our first-ever Camunda Community Unconference. Organized by our DevRel team, Unconference brought together a day of sessions that were organized by and selected by the community.
There was other opportunities to connect online, from our monthly Camunda Question Corner, to our three virtual Process Automation Forums, covering topics including finance and telecommunications, and our community-organized virtual Meetups — 29 in all originating from 16 cities spread over 10 countries.
We are looking forward to an even more eventful year 2021 – here is a small teaser: We are planning a Camunda Community Summit in late April.
The State of Process Automation
This year we also sought to better understand the wider process automation landscape. With process automation playing an outsized role in powering innovation, we commissioned a survey of 400 IT decision makers in North America and Europe to benchmark enterprise adoption and determine the biggest trends, challenges and opportunities for improvement: The State of Process Automation.
It was really interesting to see the results come together, as they showed the tremendous transformative business value that process automation delivers for such a great number of organizations and how it enables them to deliver new levels of service and expand business opportunities. At the. same time the survey results, which you can download here, also show some of the challenges process many of you are facing as you pursue the ultimate goal of the digital enterprise.
Camunda Life
Personally, I very much enjoyed welcoming nearly 100 new Camundi in 2020, such a richly talented and diverse group from all across the world. What’s more, the pandemic accelerated our move to be a remote workplace, building on an already very strong online and global culture of collaborating. That also means while we have some office hubs in several locations, we’re not restricted by geography and seek to hire the best, no matter location. If you’re interested in joining us, check out our open positions.
A New Look
As the CMO I would be amiss if I wouldn’t mention our new brand look, unveiled at the beginning of the year, with an updated logo and color palette that featured fresh, fun, bright and bold colors. We believe our brand’s new visual identity better represents Camunda and our offerings today. Our new look was designed to be easily recognizable and allude to the energy we pour into innovating and marketing our products and be more engaging for our developer community.
…and Some Fun
Just recently, our Principal Developer Advocate David Simmons’ took first place in DZone’s First Annual Computer Science Fair, with his COVID-Safe Halloween candy dispenser built using Arduino and Camunda BPM, and tested with help from Bruno Simmons.
And in a year when everything moved online, we’re excited that at least one thing had the opportunity to travel… NASA’s Perseverance Rover launched on July 30 and is currently speeding toward the Jezero Crater on Mars. We take pride in Camunda’s supporting role in space exploration.
It was inspiring to see Camundi around the world pull together so well, and to witness their hard work, dedication, flexibility, and positive energy throughout 2020. And above all we are grateful to work with so many supportive users, customer and partner organizations around the world.
We wish you the best and brightest that 2021 may have to offer.
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io